In today's New York Times, the paper report on the CDC's report that the number of new HIV infections are remaining stable; they also report an alarming increase in the number of new infections among young black gay men. For the past ten years, data has shown that the number of new infections have remained relatively stable. There's an attempt to spin the data into something more optimistic, pointing out that the number of new infections were close to 150,000 a year at their peak.
Perhaps the lack of explicit safer sex messages and education that targets the highest risk groups can be seen as at least a partial contributor to the government's inability to gain an upper hand with the pandemic. And in a future with even more restricted funding, we can expect education and prevention messages to continue to decline.
Another contributor may be complacency. As the NYT reports:
Philip Alcabes, a public health epidemiologist at Hunter College in Manhattan, noted that 50,000 is close to the number of Americans who die in road accidents each year — almost 40,000 — “and in some ways, we consider dying on the road an ordinary thing.” (my emphasis)
“So it’s not clear that prevention is a failure,” he argued. “The average adult’s chances of encountering H.I.V. infection — 0.02 percent a year — are rather low. It’s not reasonable to expect that a sexually transmitted virus will disappear in America, or anywhere else...”
Unlike driving, which is a fairly ubiquitous activity, HIV is concentrated in risk groups. Here in Long Beach--like many other urban centers--the HIV prevalence can be as high as 20 to 25 percent of gay and bisexual men, a far cry from 0.02 percent.
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